ollection of prints. In a sixth
trunk were contained his papers respecting earthquakes, volcanoes, and
geographical subjects."[233] This _Ajax flagellifer_ of the
bibliographical tribe, who was, as Dr. Dibdin observes, "the terror of
his acquaintance, and the pride of his patron," is said to have been in
private a very different man from his public character; all which may be
true, without altering a shade of that public character. The French
Revolution showed how men, mild and even kind in domestic life, were
sanguinary and ferocious in their public.

The rabid Abbe Rive gloried in terrifying, without enlightening his
rivals; he exulted that he was devoting to "the rods of criticism and
the laughter of Europe the _bibliopoles_," or dealers in books, who
would not get by heart his "Catechism" of a thousand and one questions
and answers: it broke the slumbers of honest De Bure, who had found life
was already too short for his own "Bibliographie Instructive."

The Abbe Rive had contrived to catch the shades of the appellatives
necessary to discriminate book amateurs; and of the first term he is
acknowledged to be the inventor.

A _bibliognoste_, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and
colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses
whence issued; and all the _minutiae_ of a book.

A _bibliographe_ is a describer of books and other literary
arrangements.

A _bibliomane_ is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster
than he buys, cock-brained, and purse-heavy!

A _bibliophile_, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who
appears to read them for his own pleasure.

A _bibliotaphe_ buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing
them in glass cases.

I shall catch our _bibliognoste_ in the hour of book-rapture! It will
produce a collection of bibliographical writers, and show to the
second-sighted Edinburgher what human contrivances have been raised by
the art of more painful writers than himself--either to postpone the day
of universal annihilation, or to preserve for our posterity, three
centuries hence, the knowledge which now so busily occupies us, and
transmit to them something more than what Bacon calls "Inventories" of
our literary treasures.

"Histories, and literary _bibliotheques_ (or bibliothecas), will always
present to us," says La Rive, "an immense harvest of errors, till the
authors of such catalogues shall be fully impressed by the importa